Hashtag Activism: How #NotOneMore Caught Fire Online

Richard Martinez, center, talks to the media outside the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s office on May 24.

Associated Press

In the days after the May 23 shooting and stabbing rampage that left seven people dead near the University of California, Santa Barbara, hundreds of thousands of people shared two separate hashtags in the latest examples of social-media activism. But the origins of these hashtag campaigns couldn’t have been more different.

The first one, #YesAllWomen, was created in the days after the rampage during a Twitter conversation about harassment, misogyny and violence against women.

The second one — #NotOneMore — also appeared to be a grassroots response to end gun violence, but this campaign was carefully calculated and expertly rolled out. It was the result of a media-savvy writer with political experience who took to the airwaves to galvanize support, and then backed up by the well-funded machinery of former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

WSJD spoke with those involved with the #NotOneMore campaign to get a glimpse at what can happen when grassroots and trained political and media operatives collide.

Here’s a breakdown of events:

Michael Bloomberg, who tweeted this picture, invested $50 million to start Everytown for Gun Safety.

@michaelbloomberg

Saturday, May 24
The day after the shooting, Richard Martinez, whose son, Christopher, was killed in the shooting, addressed the media outside of the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s headquarters. He asked Americans to call upon political leaders to impose stricter gun laws and to consider the impact to society of increasingly frequent episodes of gun violence. “We should say to ourselves, ‘Not one more!’”

Martinez, in an interview last week with WSJD, said he decided he was going to make a statement even as he and his family were wrapped in grief because he didn’t want the media to move on to another story. He wrote his speech over the course of about three hours and shared it with his brother and other relatives and friends as he tried to fine tune the message. It was not his first time writing a speech and his goal was not just to vent his emotion but to make Americans angry with their political leaders. “It was written in advance by someone who knows what he’s doing,” Martinez says.

In the 1980s, when he was a law student at University of California, Davis, Martinez worked for California State Representative Charles Calderon. Martinez continued to consult for the state congressman, writing speeches and overseeing legislation, after he graduated from law school. “I learned from a master politician,” Martinez says.

After Martinez delivered the statement, he says, “there was an avalanche of interest. He spoke to every media outlet he could. In studying the responses to his comments, he noted that people were remembering the phrase, “Not one more.”

Tuesday morning, May 27
By now, Martinez had become an unofficial spokesperson for bereaved relatives of gun violence victims, turning to the media to galvanize grassroots support for political action.

Speaking to the press in California, Martinez said: “Today, I’m going to ask every person I can find to send a postcard to every politician with three words on it: ‘Not one more.’ People are looking for something to do. I’m asking people to stand for up for something. Enough is enough.”

John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, appeared on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”

The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell

Tuesday afternoon, May 27
The senior staff of activist group, Everytown for Gun Safety, met in their Manhattan office to discuss the UCSB shooting and what action the group could take in response. The organization, which employs about 50 people in New York and Washington, D.C., launched in April as a marriage of two smaller groups–Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which was created after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which was founded by Mayor Bloomberg and former Boston Mayor Tom Menino. Mr. Bloomberg invested $50 million in launching the group, an Everytown spokeswoman says.

At the meeting, John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president who worked as the senior policy advisor to the mayor in the Bloomberg administration, asked the staff if it was possible to fulfill Martinez’s postcard wish. “We were moved by what Richard Martinez said, so I said to the staff, ‘He moved us, let’s move America,” Feinblatt says.

A Facebook ad from Everytown for Gun Safety shows a grieving Richard Martinez.

Everytown for Gun Safety

He turned to Ravi Garla, who heads Everytown’s digital team to ask if there was a way to quickly build a campaign. Feinblatt was scheduled to appear that evening on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” on MSNBC at 10 p.m. Feinblatt wanted to announce the postcard campaign then. “The clock was ticking,” says Garla.

Garla deployed his team to design a Web-sharing tool that would result in postcards being sent by Everytown to political representatives, calling for “commonsense laws to reduce gun violence.” On Facebook, they posted that evening a photo of a visibly shaken Martinez, with the caption, “A grieving father is asking Americans to do this one thing.”

Clicking on the post allowed people to fill out a form with their home and email addresses to send postcards reading, “Not One More.”

Just as Feinblatt was leaving to go the MSNBC for the live interview, Garla ran to a FedEx store to print out color copies on what the postcards will look like so that that Feinblatt could show them on air. “We got it up on our website that night,” Garla says.

That evening, an email went out to Everytown’s list of 1.5 million to ask that they go to the website and opt in to the postcard campaign. “We knew there would be a strong response among supporters, but what we couldn’t predict was that after they took the action, they would share it as much as they did. People just kept sharing it. In the end, more than half of the postcards came from people sharing it peer-to-peer on Facebook,” Garla says.

Actress Julianne Moore tweeted this picture to show her support for the #NotOneMore campaign.

@_juliannemoore

Thursday, May 29
Actress Julianne Moore sent a tweet with a photo of herself holding a sign reading, #NotOneMore, helping to fuel the proliferation of the hashtag. Mayor Bloomberg and Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider also sent similar tweets with their photos. And a number of celebrities have tweeted the hashtag, such as rapper Snoop Dogg, actress Eliza Dushku and author and executive Arianna Huffington.

Early weeks of June
More than 600,000 Americans clicked on the link and signed up, activating the postcard-generating tool. More than 127,000 tweets with the hashtag #notonemore have been sent, according to Topsy, a social media search service.

This will culminate in the delivery of more than 2.4 million postcards—one to each of the participants’ senators, congressional representative and governor.

Everytown’s list of supporters has grown to nearly 2 million, allowing them to send numerous emails. In the weeks after the postcard campaign, every person on the list has received numerous emails signed by Moore, Bloomberg and others with links to share on Facebook and Twitter.

Monday, June 16

The Everytown for Gun Safety’s website encourages people to sign up to their cause and send these postcards to government officials.

Everytown for Gun Safety

A day after the deadline for signing up to send postcards, Everytown announced Monday that Martinez will meet Tuesday in Washington with survivors of other gun-related killings in Tucson, Ariz., Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn. On Friday, Martinez will deliver “Not One More” postcards to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, according to Everytown.

Martinez says he had no idea Everytown was going to build a Web-sharing tool around his words. “But I’m sure glad they did,” he says.